Belinda screamed. With a wild cry, Keffa pushed off the bubble wall and flailed forward to tackle the heavy robot. The force of his leap drove both him and the robot out through the membrane with a hollow pop. As soon as they passed into the superdense atmosphere, the man was crushed to a splatter-smear of flesh and blood. The robot spun away, falling as it tried to reorient itself.
Now only six captives remained, and more Klikiss robots surrounded Jess’s ship. The escape bubble rose toward the upper atmospheric layers, but not nearly fast enough. The black robots swarmed higher, their beetle wings flapping, their propulsion systems driving at high speed.
Unable to do anything more himself, Jess again pleaded with the wentals. In his head, the elemental voices answered, The robots are not our primary enemies.
“They’re my primary enemies right now! If you don’t do something, we’re going to die.” After an interminable pause, the wentals grudgingly agreed.
Diamondlike water vapor condensed out of the moisture-laden slipstreams. Living wet fog folded around the flying robots, individual packets of mist that began as gauzy cocoons, then condensed into bubbles of water. Within moments, the pursuing robots were encased in what looked like giant raindrops. The black machines struggled inside the blobs of liquid, and then, in a snapping instant, the water cocoons froze solid, encapsulating the robots. The nodules of ice dropped away like hailstones.
Tasia and Robb hurled smug insults at the robots. The other captives sat in shock. Belinda huddled with her eyes closed, as if counting the seconds until they could be far from there.
Jess shot their ship through the highest layers of the atmospheric battlefield, and the gaseous air grew thinner. “We’re almost to the edge of space.”
Before the wental ship could escape into orbit, a group of six already corroded warglobes gave chase. “Shizz, don’t the drogues have bigger problems right now?” Tasia said.
Jess answered, “In us, they see an enemy they believe they can destroy. Hold on!” He sent the bubble into a wild pinball spin.
“Still think this is easy, Tamblyn?” Robb held his stomach as if he were about to vomit.
The half dozen warglobes followed the escaping bubble, lumbering closer as if to roll over the ship with brute force. No matter how much speed he urged from the wental vessel, Jess lost ground. He could not avoid all six hydrogue spheres. They would be on him in moments.
“We came so close,” Tasia groaned. “Dammit, we came so close!”
Finally the ship tore free of Qronha 3’s atmosphere and shot out into clear, empty space. Behind them, the last veils of indistinct mist faded as the churning clouds continued their elemental battles.
Space beyond the planet was crisp and black, unhindered by obstacles, but Jess found no sanctuary there. The warglobes hounded them like howling wolves, their hulls scarred and close to cracking. He dodged a lance of blue lightning, but couldn’t go any faster.
With no place to hide, he swept downward again, grazing the edge of the atmosphere. The gigantic world rolled past below, and dark battle stains spread through the clouds.
And a miracle rose over the bright edge of the gas giant, backlit by the distant sun: a tangle of branches and thorns, huge limbs extending from an armored core trunk. Seven of the new verdani battleships Jess had helped create, ready to intercept any fleeing warglobes.
Jess drove his small protective sphere straight toward the treeships.
Tasia cried, “Jess, what are you doing? Look at those things!”
“Beautiful, aren’t they?”
Closing in, the pursuing warglobes tumbled after Jess’s tiny bubble. They didn’t seem to understand the threat of the treeships until it was too late.
Extending huge, thorny branches, the flying trees seized the already damaged alien globes. Blue lightning bolts sizzled out, along with icewave spurts, but the spiny treeships ignored the searing energy. They embraced the warglobes with their thick limbs and squeezed. With silent explosions in empty space, the warglobes crumbled. Jagged shards tumbled slowly back into Qronha 3’s deep atmosphere like so many smashed components of a Roamer skymine. Leaving the wreckage of hydrogues behind, the verdani treeships climbed away from the gas giant and soared off in search of other targets.
Carrying his frightened passengers far from their hellish hydrogue prison, Jess flew off to safety and freedom. They were cramped in the water-bubble ship, but Tasia and her companions would have endured anything to get away from their captors.
Jess groaned when an EDF ship appeared over the planet. It was a large scout, a troop transport rather than a battleship. After a tense moment, Jess recognized the vessel and its pilot. “Conrad Brindle, I told you to go back to Earth.”
“I came to help,” the pilot transmitted.
Suddenly excited, Robb grabbed at Tasia’s arms. “Is that my father? What’s he doing here?”
“If he’s offering a real toilet and a bunk to sleep on, I’m there,” Tasia said. “Shizz, right now even spampax sounds delicious.”
“I’ll see what I can arrange,” Jess said. The EDF scout vessel approached, drawing closer to the wental bubble. Jess sent out the message “I’ve got a few people who would like to come aboard, Commander Brindle. They belong with you more than with me.”
“Nobody knows where we belong anymore,” Tasia said.
Robb answered, “We sure as hell belong away from that nightmare.”
“No argument from me there, Brindle.”
“I have seats for them all,” the man answered. “I can take them back to Earth . . . or wherever they want to go.”
135
FORMER PRINCE DANIEL
As the effects of the twitcher wore off, Daniel struggled to regain control of his unreliable body. He had never experienced a sensation like that, falling through the transportal. It felt as if his body had been folded, turned inside out, flown forever in an instant—then dropped intact somewhere far, far away.
It had been nighttime in the Palace District when Peter and Estarra threw him through the dimensional doorway, and the sudden sunlight was so bright that his eyes hurt. He couldn’t wait to get back at them. Even if they were the King and Queen, they had no right to do this to him—him! Those two would soon be ousted, and he would be the new King. Nobody could treat a King this way.
Daniel rolled to one side on the uneven ground, flapped his numb hands, and tried to find his footing. The sky was dusty brown, and the air smelled awful, like dirt, wet weeds, slimy mud . . . even poop. What was this place?
Though his muscles continued to misfire, Daniel lurched to his hands and knees, caught his breath, then squatted on his heels. When he looked around, the distances seemed huge. He was up on a slope, and the horizon was very far away. He saw tall grasses, square patches of crops, and small human figures moving in a wide fertile valley. Colorful prefab houses were aligned in a tiny town that might have looked quaint if he’d seen it in a nostalgic videoloop.
Weatherworn Klikiss towers poked up from the plain, but they had crumbled to little more than nubs, like rotted teeth. He couldn’t identify this particular planet, but all pictures he had seen of Klikiss colony worlds looked the same to him anyway. He’d never had any intention of visiting one.
Behind him, the transportal wall was the only nearby structure. He used it to support himself as he got to his feet and brushed off his clothes—pajamas and a robe, certainly not the finery in which he wanted to be seen. Worse, he had pissed himself. It was so unseemly for a King, or even a Prince.
Indignant, Daniel raised his voice and started yelling for guards, for the Chairman. Someone was bound to hear him. He rubbed his muscles, gradually getting back full control of his body.
“Hello?” he shouted again. “Why doesn’t somebody answer?”
He waved his arms, drawing the attention of the dark-clad workers tilling the crop patches. The distant group began to come toward him, but they didn’t seem to be in a hurry. With a heavy sigh, Daniel trudged to me
et them halfway.
The ground was muddy with irrigation and—yes, indeed—he distinctly smelled poop. He couldn’t wait to tell Chairman Wenceslas what Peter and Estarra had done to him. They were going to be in so much trouble!
As he approached the group of men, he saw that they all carried dirty farm tools—rakes, hoes, shovels. One even led a plow horse! They looked hot and sweaty in their rough clothes. Every man sported a wide-brimmed hat, and most had facial hair that was untrimmed and unstyled. Perhaps they hadn’t been able to find a barber to join them on their colonization initiative.
When the men came closer, Daniel almost gagged. He’d never smelled so much body odor before. The farmers didn’t even seem to notice. At least they appeared peaceful and friendly, smiling beneath the shadowed brims of the hats.
“Welcome to Happiness,” said the first man to arrive. “We weren’t expecting visitors, but we’re pleased to have you join us.”
“I don’t intend to join you. I’m the victim of a heinous crime, and I demand your assistance. I am Prince Daniel, soon to be King of the Terran Hanseatic League. You all owe me your allegiance.” He expected gasps of awe or bows of deference; instead, the bearded men looked at him curiously. They introduced themselves faster than he could remember any names.
“We are just neo-Amish farmers,” said the leader, who called himself Jeremiah Huystra. “We established this bucolic settlement here as a bastion of the old ways, one step closer to Eden.”
Daniel spluttered, wondering how anyone could call this dirty, primitive place an Eden. “I insist upon priority treatment. I’m your Prince.” He gestured toward the Klikiss transportal wall behind him. “Send me back to the Whisper Palace, where I belong.”
Jeremiah and the other neo-Amish farmers shrugged. “Oh, we don’t use that thing anymore. None of us knows how, and we don’t wish to. We stopped receiving shipments from the Hansa a while back, and I doubt we’ll get any more. But that is a blessing, since we came here to be left in peace.”
The enormity sank in. Daniel blinked his blue eyes several times, looking around this primitive planet that someone had had the nerve to name Happiness. Peter and Estarra had planned this! They knew he would be stranded here without any hope of getting back.
As if he’d been hit with a twitcher again, the Prince dropped to the ground and began to sob. His hands made fists and pounded the unyielding dirt.
Jeremiah Huystra put a strong hand on the young man’s shoulder. “Do not despair. You have nothing to fear.” Huystra handed him a crude homemade hoe. “You are welcome to join us. We can always use another worker.”
136
ADAR ZAN’NH
After the last explosions died away, space became eerily still, a graveyard of drifting wrecks. The remaining ships performed emergency repairs, while EDF scouts searched for survivors.
From the warliner’s command nucleus Adar Zan’nh took inventory of what he had left. So much of the Solar Navy was gone! Two full cohorts of ships, every single warliner destroyed. But thanks to the Roamer traders and their ingenious invention, Tal Lorie’nh had not been required to add another cohort and hundreds of thousands more Ildiran lives to the cost.
All together it had just barely been enough. Across the Spiral Arm, the deep-core aliens were suffering defeat after defeat from other unforeseen battles. The hydrogues had not expected to combat so many enemies on so many fronts. Even the Ildirans had not counted on all those unexpected allies.
Even so, Zan’nh could still feel the stinging cries of uncounted dead and injured back on Ildira. He desperately wanted to know what had happened there.
And now he needed to show his strength to get through this. In the quiet after the holocaust, he stared at the starry emptiness around him. His skeleton crew worked with all possible speed to restore the flagship’s engines, but when the chief mechanic returned smeared with grimy residue, his face was downcast. “We cannot complete the repairs ourselves, Adar. The damage is too severe.”
Zan’nh nodded. “Scavenge the components we need. I will make contact with Tal Lorie’nh’s warliners and request their assistance.”
Once he expressed his need to Tal Lorie’nh, though, he was surprised when General Lanyan’s voice interrupted him. He had forgotten the EDF was also tied into their Ildiran command frequency. “I know you Solar Navy types like to keep to yourselves, but we could help you out in a snap. After all, Ildirans did give us our stardrive technology two centuries ago. We use pretty much the same equipment as you do.”
Zan’nh reminded himself that without the Earth Defense Forces, and without the assistance of Sullivan Gold and Tabitha Huck in equipping the automated warliners, the hydrogues would never have been beaten.
“General Lanyan, we would be grateful if your engineers could help us.”
“No trouble at all.”
Less than an hour later, Lanyan’s shuttle entered the warliner’s landing bay. Zan’nh and two crewmen went to meet him, while the minimal Ildiran crew continued to work. As the square-jawed General emerged from the shuttle accompanied by a well-equipped EDF technical team, the Adar remained rigid. He remembered all too clearly the curses this man had showered upon him when he believed Zan’nh had betrayed him.
Instead of accusations, the bullish commander grabbed the Adar’s hand and pumped it so vigorously that Zan’nh’s elbow ached. “It was all a setup, a goddamned setup! You sure fooled me and my soldiers. For a few moments there you made me crap my new uniform, but you put one over on the drogues even more than you did on us!”
“I apologize for not being more forthcoming, General. I had my instructions. We had to keep our plans secret from the hydrogues, but we assumed the green priests had disseminated the details of the plan to you.”
“Not a word of it. And we didn’t expect the Roamers to come either. Everything turned out all right—can’t complain about that—but I still feel completely caught with my pants down.”
“As I said, General, we assumed the Hansa knew. Do you not speak with your green priests?”
“Not so much anymore.”
Zan’nh explained how his warliners had been automated with help from Hansa engineers, then he gave the General his long-awaited tour of a Solar Navy warliner, while the EDF technical crew met with Ildiran engineers to determine how much of the flagship was salvageable. Lanyan claimed to have experts familiar with “old-fashioned” stardrive designs; over the centuries, the humans had made many modifications—the General called them “improvements”—to the stardrives. “And what we can’t fix for you, we’ll replace. We’ve got the largest salvage yard in the Spiral Arm right out there.”
A message came from Tal Lorie’nh. “Adar, my cohort is ready to return to Ildira, if you wish to accompany us. We can leave your flagship here and return for it later with a full restoration crew.”
General Lanyan had already received a report from his engineering team. “If we all work together, Adar, we could have the basic repairs finished in a few days.”
Zan’nh hesitated. He wanted to rush back to the Prism Palace, to learn what had happened with the watchdog warglobes once he’d turned the tables during the hydrogue ambush. He knew that his father was still alive—he would have felt the Mage-Imperator’s death like a scream through the thism—and he knew that the hydrogues were vanquished, though many thousands of Ildirans had died.
Zan’nh pondered the options and then reached his decision. He would send Tal Lorie’nh back with his cohort of warliners to assist at Ildira. For the moment, that was enough. “No, thank you, Tal. I will keep one warliner here to assist me. Meanwhile, return to Mijistra and make your report to the Mage-Imperator. I will come home soon, in my own flagship.”
137
QUEEN ESTARRA
Connected through telink to the verdani battleships, green priests followed the battles across the Spiral Arm, the vanquishing of hydrogue gas giants, the tremendous last stand at Earth. All of the new verdani seedships had uprooted themse
lves from the forest floor and joined the other monstrous trees in space, fighting against their ancient enemies.
But Theroc itself was quiet and undefended.
The arrival of a small hydrogue craft created quite a stir. The worldtrees rustled, preparing to defend themselves with a barrage of seed-projectiles. Green priests rushed out to see. Mother Alexa and Father Idriss stood together on a high open balcony of the fungus-reef city, looking fearfully into the sky.
But the tiny diamond bubble made no threatening moves. It hovered over a ragged gap in the thick canopy, then passed down to settle onto the churned dirt where Beneto’s five-trunked treeship had torn itself from the ground.
When the small sphere’s hatch finally hissed open, releasing a breath of Earth-normal air, King Peter and Queen Estarra stepped out. They were accompanied by a stiffly formal Teacher compy.
Estarra was overjoyed. “We’re home!”
It had been so long. She could not absorb enough details of her beautiful world: the color of the sky, the quality of the sunlight, the overarching majesty of the great trees that had twice survived hydrogue devastation. The smells were fresh and wonderful, perfumes of flowers, sharp oils from dark green leaves, and the warm musk exuded by the worldtrees.
In the years since the horrific attack that had killed her brother Reynald, the people had worked slavishly to heal the wounds. Dead trees had been cleared away, new treelings planted. The surge of life from the wental comet had covered many of the freshest scars.
Estarra clung to Peter’s arm with great pleasure. “I never knew how much I’d miss everything about Theroc. I can’t wait to show you my world.”
Peter stroked her hair, more interested in his Queen’s happiness than in answering the questions of the cheering people who came to meet them. “You talk about Theroc so much, and I’ve seen images . . . but no words or pictures could do justice to this. It’s a perfect place for us.”
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